The film is a dramatic re-enactment of real-life events that took place in 1968 in the small village of San Miguel Canoa in Puebla, México. There a group of five young employees of the Autonomous University of Puebla intended to spend the night en route to a hike up La Malinche. The group was viciously set upon by villagers who had been manipulated by a local right-wing priest to believe them to be Communist revolutionaries and deserved lynching.
The film is shot in a documentary style and examines the pervasive atmosphere of repression in the country following wide-spread protests over the government's spending on the 1968 Summer Olympics, eventually leading to a massacre of hundreds of protestors in Mexico City.